Roar ready for finals

After playing out three dead rubbers to finish the regular season, Roar coach Mike Mulvey says his team is ready to rediscover its best football heading into the finals series.

After playing out three dead rubbers to finish the regular season, Roar coach Mike Mulvey says his team is ready to rediscover its best football heading into the finals series.

The Premier's Plate winners turned in an uninspired display in going down 2-0 to the Central Coast Mariners at Suncorp Stadium on Saturday, in a game which the visitors were able to nullify the Roar's usual free-flowing football.

Mulvey was quick to praise his counterpart, but also bemoaned his pragmatic methods.

'I want to give Phil Moss a lot of credit because I think he's done a great job at the Central Coast Mariners,' Mulvey said.

'However, at the same time, I don't want to seem like I'm criticising, but it's a lot easier to spoil than create.

'And that's what they came to do tonight, and very clinically they got us on the counter-attack, and if you watch football from all over the world, that's a classic snatch and grab situation.

'They came here and they were very, very determined, incredibly disciplined, and they got us to do what they wanted us to do, and that is to play through the middle more often than not.

'We didn't really use the width as well as we could.'

Despite previous claims that motivation would not be a problem for the closing rounds of the regular season, Mulvey said that it had difficult for his side to play to their maximum potential with first place already secured.

'The difficulty is, we won the league by a streak, and we won it three games ago, and we've played three dead rubbers.

'It doesn't matter which way you look at it; we were determined, and I talked the talk about 'we're going to go for the wins' and that's exactly what we wanted to do, but it's very difficult to keep that aggressive intensity when you know there's no real reward at the end of the night.